“Great Literature About Business - Wall Street Journal” |
| Great Literature About Business - Wall Street Journal Posted: 03 Jun 2010 03:20 PM PDT Message from Five Filters: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. Every great novel should impart business lessons. As George Horace Lorimer, long-time editor of the Saturday Evening Post, once said, "Every business day [is] full of comedy, tragedy, farce, romance—all the ingredients of successful fiction." I can imagine a businessperson learning about negotiation from Jane Austen, about megalomania from Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" or the futility of resisting change in "The Leopard" by Giuseppe di Lampedusa. It's disappointing that so few fiction writers, past or present, seem to find business a worthy canvas for their imaginations. Nonfiction writers have proven that business stories can be page turners ("Barbarians at the Gate" by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar; "Indecent Exposure" by David McClintick; "The Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder). A novelist sometimes derogatorily referred to as "businesslike" for his methodical writing habits, Anthony Trollope reveled in the drama of business in "The Way We Live Now," a satire of financial speculation in 19th-century England. Trollope reportedly later said he regretted the severity of his mockery, but his portrait of the unscrupulous financier Augustus Melmotte is all too relevant today. Anybody in business would surely admire the creative accounting in Nikolai Gogol's "Dead Souls." In America, Theodore Dreiser based his 1912 novel "The Financier" on the Chicago wheeler-dealer Charles T. Yerkes. Sinclair Lewis invented a character, George F. Babbitt, who inspired a noun, babbittry—a smug, bourgeois mentality. Lewis also wrote many short stories about business that have been collected in "If I Were Boss." These stories, wrote Christopher P. Wilson in "White Collar Fictions," took the measure of "the cold wind of absurdity blowing off the waste lands of our American commercial chaos." In David Lodge's 1988 comic novel, "Nice Work," Robyn, a Marxist, feminist university teacher is assigned to shadow Vic, a no-nonsense foundry manager, for a year—and both learn some surprising lessons about capitalism and prejudice: "That's the trouble with capitalism, isn't it?" Robyn says. "It's a lottery. There are winners and losers." "It's the trouble with life," Vic replies. Write to Cynthia Crossen at cynthia.crossen@wsj.com Five Filters featured article: Into the Abyss. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
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